A Columnist at Risk

Abstract

THOSE who say that schools cannot improve student learning on their own run the risk of being called disbelievers, or charged with overlooking the many schools that do make a difference, or, worst of all, accused of being racist. I'm willing to take that risk. Until school reformers acknowledge the importance of nonschool influences, they will keep on imposing policies that are unfair to teachers principals ignoring policies that could make a difference. Many economists have been saying this for a long time, citing such obvious health barriers to learning as poor eyesight, infected teeth, hunger. Others make broad statements about inadequate parenting or unsafe neighborhoods. A recent National Endowment for the Arts report documents continuing declines in reading for pleasure, especially among teenagers. A compilation of statistical evidence about influences on learning that begin before a child even enters school recently made headlines for ETS. The Family: America's Smallest School notes that the United States ranks highest in the world in the number of single-parent households; Japan is lowest. It is not solely our curriculum or the uneven quality of our teachers that puts us low in the rankings. Then there is the issue of the number of families in which hunger is a problem: 11%, according to the ETS report. The bureaucrats call these families the food insecure, a term that would be laughable if we weren't talking about a moral outrage in the richest country in the world. Massachusetts other northeastern states receive praise for their standards performance on standardized tests. However, the median family income in these states is $70,000, while in Mississippi the District of Columbia it is less than $40,000. These are not excuses. They are realities. The schools often cited for beating such odds surely deserve credit, but their success is fragile often dependent on scarce leadership. Meanwhile, policy makers devise strategies to punish schools that fail to reach such levels as if the odds against them did not exist. It would be good for children their parents if everyone--teachers, principals, reformers, policy makers--took time to understand more fully what these realities mean for teaching As a start, they could study two sources that have recently gotten my attention because they go a long way toward explaining what is happening in our schools. One is the research by Claude Steele, which he summarized for school board members in the 2007 Jacqueline P. Danzberger Memorial Lecture. Steele, the director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, is a social psychologist who has focused on the impact of social identity on He believes that is necessary for learning. People's identities--race, gender, age, or other characteristics--can interfere with a sense of belonging and thereby interfere with learning. He tells the story of Anatole Broyard, a renowned book reviewer for the New York Times, who grew up as a black in the Bronx in a high yellow family whose father passed during the day in order to get a job. Broyard married as a black, but after returning from World War II he became white, divorced, broke ties with all his family, became a writer, a bookstore owner, eventually a reviewer for the newspaper. …